Fatherhood Eve

Friday, August 23, 2013

2 minutes. GO!

So, all you gotta do is throw down your two minutes in the comments section of the old blog. No pressure, no competition, play as many times as you like... it's a party. ;)

Wake up. Dust off the brain. Is it getting dustier? Probably. You need to get rid of the guilt, too. It's not a guilt about anything specific. Just a feeling that you're doing things wrong. You need to do them right. Or you need to go get the paint scraper and get under those layers. Remove the guilt one firm stroke at a time. That sounds dirty, but I don't have time to fix it. And, really, that's about the most accurate summation of my life I've ever come up with. Put it on my tombstone. Life: It's dirty, but you don't have time to fix it.

16 comments:

I live a normal, happy life for the most part. You know, I go out and spend time with friends, I spend time online…and occasionally, just occasionally…you can find me wandering about outside in either my underwear or nothing at all. I black out…and that generally means I end up without any memories whatsoever of where I am or what I was doing. I dream a lot though, and my dreams are always the same…

Always there lingers a pair of wolves, both blacker than the night that which shields me from view when I slink through the trees. My hair masks me, and I thank the years spent on a pageant circuit that had me loving my hair when it was so long that it was literally a curtain that fell to my back…a curtain of what had been described as ink in the past, I knew. I loved it even in my dreams, when it was a silken weight tipping my head back for the silver flash of metal that burned as it scorched my life from my veins.

I don't know anything about it. You can ask me all you want. This chair's uncomfortable and your coffee sucks, but I don't give a shit. Ask as many questions as you want. No, I don't know him. No, we never went to the same school. No, the fact that he was brave had nothing to do with it. That's a commentary on me, right? You're trying to piss me off? It won't work. I'll alternate my eyes between that sparkly badge and the ceiling panel, brown, sodden - waiting for it's day to drop. Maybe you'll be standing under it.

She’s frozen in time, the tall, patrician woman in the starchy wedding gown, her face a mask of steel and nerve. But come closer. Look into her eyes. She wants to run. If not for the thousands of guests, the photographers, she might have done it. Although how can one run in those shoes, those terrible shoes, and with all those whalebone stays she’ll collapse from the inability to breathe. She doesn’t want to marry this man, a distant cousin. It’s only for the papers, for his political career. Her mother wanted her out of the house and wedded to a man with promise to keep the young woman out of trouble, to keep the neighbors from talking. If she only knew. But by her face, maybe she already did. The trouble she was getting into, the misery she would face, the harpie of a mother-in-law she was also wedding on that day.

Bro, don't hate me, I started writing and it wanted to keep going and I couldn't bring myself to stop it. Consider this two entries in one, lol?

Anyway:

It's like being trapped inside a dirty white room with only one door: the glare of the fluorescents scratch your corneas; the random, rhythmless drip of a tap somewhere keeps you from sleeping or even relaxing. The lights make dying electric sounds. There are things in the dim corners; terrible things. You wonder if the room will run out of oxygen. Your heart rate picks up, tethering itself to this new anxiety. But then it in turn goes away; you forget to be scared and wonder instead whether you're already dead. Then, there are the scenes on the dirty walls, projected by a pitiless torturer known as nostalgia: happy scenes that feel like they could sever your aorta; once-shining things now like shards. They cut and you bleed. You are in this room every day. For weeks. Months. Bleeding, in appalling pain or feeling nothing. You must be dead, you think. Then, one day, of no particular calendrical significance, you stand and look through the dirty pane of glass and see a small boy walking by and another child on a bicycle is riding like a neutrino in a collider toward the first child and you think some terrible reaction will occur, but the boy sees the bike and sidesteps it, and…. that is all. The threat is past. You once knew how to do that and now you know again; you know to ready yourself for the assaults, that they will be coming, sure, but you can roll away, use their momentum, sidestep them, remove their sting, deflect the worst. At which point, astonished, you realize the door had never even been locked.

It grew downward, like no other organism she knew. Black, with fronds that wrapped around each other in embrace of the gravity that drew the scum towards her. Ordained by the landlord whose fake magnanimity trapped her there, it spawned. Mould on a bathroom ceiling, he might have said, so what? She knew, of course, that the spores ate at her lungs and the same pitch grew in her lungs, sideways and up, and would eventually and inexorably choke her. It wasn't smoker's tar that would get her in the end.

I thought it would be so simple. I would close my eyes either I would open then or not. If not, I was home free. If so, well that presented an entire list of problems,pain, and expense. But either way, I would be. Either a memory for those I leave behind or a problem for those around. Some choice. But of all the choices we have, few are good. Few are really bad for that matter. You close you eyes. Later you either open them, or you don't.

Swinging the machete. Sweat dripping. One foot in front of the other. Creating a path. No. It's not a path. A path is a map of someone else's journey. Someone else's dream. This is a map of *my* wandering. It never gets easier. I get more tired. My life and the lives of my family would have been easier had I followed someone else's path, but I selfishly always strike out into the wilderness. Swinging the machete.